In conversation with Zadie Smith

Find out what Smith likes to wear while writing, and the subject of her new book

It’s seven years since Zadie Smith published her last novel, On Beauty. In that time she’s written a new one, she’s had a baby, she’s taken up running, she’s become a lecturer on Kafka and Kierkegaard at New York University.

The new novel NW is a dazzling portrait of life in London. It’s about what it is like to live there right now, in a fragmented, consumerist society; about friendship and family; about class, and the search for feeling. It’s by far the best thing she’s written. She says, “This feels like my first novel, because it’s the first novel I’ve written as an adult. I’m better at it now.”

What Zadie Smith wears to write

“Writing is so student-like. You choose a café and you write every day, you’re always in your pyjamas, you don’t work in summer.” Does she really spend all day in her pyjamas, still? “Well… sweatpants, dressing gown and a horrible woolly hat. Or a cap. Wax earplugs, which I carry around with me. It’s so I can get a feeling of enclosure.” Let’s hope she never leaves the house that way. “In the past, if I wanted to go out somewhere in the evening, I’d get incredibly over-excited because I’d been in sweatpants all day. I’d put on a massive dress, get there and realise that everyone’s come straight from work and is saying, ‘What the hell are you wearing?!’” Such outfits have become a big part of the Zadie persona: dramatic vintage dresses, flowers in her hair, colourful headwraps, glossed lips. “How you dress is part of the joy of life,” she says. “I had to go to Italy to understand it: to be a serious person you don’t have to sneer at clothes.” But she works the look, no question. “I do like to look a bit scary, like a person of substance. As you get older you can get very grand. You can investigate capes.”

Call me Grandpa Smith

Natalie, a central character in the new novel and a black woman in her thirties, has earlier changed her name from Keisha. It’s a reinvention and a way to hide; and I wonder if that’s why Zadie, too, changed her name— she was, until her teens, plain Sadie Smith. “It was just one letter!” she says. “I changed it because I was in love with a boy whose name began with ‘Z’.” (She won’t tell me who.) “I still think of myself as Sadie, and most of my family call me Sadie.” There are some unintended consequences of being called Zadie, however. “In New York, everyone tells me that ‘Zadie’ means ‘grandpa’ in Yiddish. So my name is a thing of fun in America — I'm 'Grandpa Smith' to all the Jews in New York.”

Read the complete story in the November 2012 issue of Vogue India. Buy it here!